Ambergris Music and Finch

December 27, 2008

Robert Devereux created Fungicide as an experimental accompaniment to City of Saints and Madmen, which made sense because of the many different post-modern renovations and experiments in the text. (It also includes a reading of “The Exchange” by yours truly.) The cover art is by Hawk Alfredson, whose work was an influence on me while writing Shriek. The interior booklet contains several pieces by Alfredson, as well as Devereux’s own written riff on Ambergris. You can check out samples here.

For Shriek: An Afterword, the second Ambergris book, The Church did a soundtrack for the Shriek movie, and then decided to expand on that for a more complex song cycle that’s a soundtrack to the novel. It even uses lines from the novel as lyrics. This time, Ben Templesmith provided the cover art, and it’s the packaging that provides extra value, rather than an insert booklet. The CD is available with the Shriek limited and, eventually, from The Church directly. The music in this case is slightly more out there than a regular Church CD, but not by much. Since I wrote Shriek while listening to The Church, I think there’s a synergy between their sound and the rhythms of the novel. Here’s a little sampler of the music that I put together–four short bits from four different songs.

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So, now there’s Finch, which I’ve posted a couple of excerpts from on this blog. It’s got a more hardboiled, stripped-down style, and I’m seriously thinking about approaching a band to see if we could put out a CD based on the novel. It just seems like something would be missing otherwise. In re-reading Finch, I’m thinking bands like Murder by Death, Nick Cave, Darker My Love, stuff like that. But I’m curious–based on the excerpts, what do you think the music should be like? (Should have a cover soon, by the way.)

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Comments

I think The Decemberists might be a nice choice, if their recent material is any indication. See if you can find their mysterious B-Side “Culling of the Fold”, or their harder/heavier stuff on “The Crane Wife”. It sounds like New Weird to my ears.

Poe was the first thing I thought of. Eerie, beautiful, sultry, vaguely threatening… reminds me of Ambergris itself. Could be a touch too pop, though.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...